The FT Digital Business piece mentioning SMS Text News

Quite a few people emailed to ask what the Financial Times was about this week. I emailed them and got their permission to reproduce the first four paragraphs:

Link: Financial Times – How to find out what is being said about you

Ewan MacLeod was angry. He had been charged for sending an e-mail from a mobile phone via a package that claimed to offer free, unlimited data usage.

Months after he had written about the experience on his blog, Mr MacLeod was surprised to receive a call from the mobile phone company, 3, inviting him to meet chief finance officer Frank Sixt. Apparently, someone had posted his comments on the company’s blog, set up to promote the free service.

‘Any big business is a faceless wonder, but a blog gives you the power to talk to someone in a company,” says Mr MacLeod, author of SMS Text News. ‘I had a call saying, ‘Frank would like to meet you.’ I was entirely delighted with the result.”

Mr MacLeod was proved correct, refunded and invited to post a blog on the company’s website, but the story highlights how companies can struggle to monitor the huge amount of feedback published about them.

If you’ve got yourself an FT.com subscription, then you can read the whole piece here.

If you don’t have a subscription, you can get one for just £8 a month — I recommend it. No FT? No comment 😉